I wrote this a few months ago and figured I'd go ahead and post it. I originally wrote it as a way to process my feelings about my own beliefs. TW about depression, paranoia, and leaving one's birth religion.
I don’t know when I realized I was depressive. It should have been something I figured out early on, but didn’t hit me until later. I guess now is still early for most, given I’m 22. Realizing I lost my religion at the age of 17 made me have to recontextualize my worldview in a way that uprooted me from long held beliefs from birth. That was not easy. I remember at the beginning, just conceptualizing right and wrong as ideas that were not tied to a deity was difficult. The urge to pray was instilled in me since childhood, so it took a while before I stopped feeling it out of habit.
Something that has confused me since I started questioning my former faith is how anyone can believe that “objective” morality is an intelligible concept. Morality is a framework for how an individual conceptualizes the weight of actions and situations. Something is considered immoral if one’s moral framework says so. I specified individuals instead of groups because within groups, there is a mismatch between what people consider moral, making a moral framework an inherently individual phenomenon. Objectivity is the idea that something is true regardless of one’s viewpoint. Gravity pulls me down towards the ground whether I believe it or am conscious to experience it. If a deity claims their moral framework is objective, it simply isn’t. They are labeling their subjective moral framework as one that is true regardless of one’s viewpoint, even though the existence of their moral framework is completely dependent on them as an individual. It’s akin to saying my taste in music is the objective taste in music (which it is, of course). My taste in music is my own subjective experience and is completely contingent on me. How would I establish that something I feel is good is good irrespective of others’ viewpoints? It’s an unintelligible claim.
How do you establish objectivity? I don’t know. I also find objectivity as a concept to be hard to wrap my head around given my previous argument. So how do you establish anything as objectively true? I don’t think you can. Every experience you have is contingent on yourself, making them relative experiences, which would make you reach a similar stopping point as the previous argument. It’s hard to let go of the idea that things need to be objectively true. The closest thing I can get to objectivity is the scientific method, which is an attempt to converge onto truths.
I like to separate things I consider true into two categories: “functional” and “convergent” truths. Functional truths are truths I hold because they’re convenient for perceiving and conceptualizing reality. They’re essentially axioms. I try to minimize these because axioms cannot be verified. I hold my senses as being generally accurate as a functional truth. It’s an unfalsifiable claim, but is also convenient to perceiving and experiencing the world. If a functional truth can’t be verified, they may reduce the accuracy of my held worldview because of a direct or implied assumption coming from that functional truth. One example would be god. I’ve had conversations with folks that hold god as an axiom. That creates implied beliefs that reinforce the supernatural, which are unfalsifiable, but due to people’s axiom that a god exists, it allows them to also believe in supernatural phenomena because one of their axioms supports it. Convergent truths are simply truths that are enforced by many people observing the same phenomenon. It’s the scientific process. If many people experience gravity to the point that we can describe it usually mathematical notation, it’s safe to say it exists.
I’ve struggled with mental illness in the past. Like most people, depression, but also lots of delusions. Deep paranoia about imminent supernatural things that I felt deeply in my heart but knew in my head were delusions. I got to the point that I wasn’t sure whether my reality was real at times. I’ve heard the argument that if life wasn’t real that it wouldn’t be worth living and that you should just lay there until you die because it doesn’t matter. It’s interesting because you get to establish what you think is real up to a certain point. Even if my life wasn’t real, that wouldn’t make the sensations and experiences I have any different. Why should life being real deter me from experiencing it? I don’t hold an opinion on whether my life is real because, frankly, I don’t give a fuck. I still get to drive two hours to see my brother and almost throw my guts up at an Indian restaurant. I still get to hit that riff for the first time after a week of practicing it. I still get to tell my mother how I lost my faith and have to sit there to hear her remarks. Those experiences don’t change.
This idea of relativity in morality is such a shallow topic but once stepped in, instantly engulfs me. Starting meaning from where I draw it is such a freeing yet threatening idea because of the amount of, essentially, creative freedom you have to apply to your own wants. Whenever I make a song, I almost always run into a block. Whether I should add more chords or if I should put another instrument in, after a certain point the amount of freedom I can apply to that song is just too much and I need to take a step back to listen, and listen, and listen and understand what it is will scratch that itch in my brain. I find morality to be a similar concept. Because of the amount of freedom you have to do different things that inevitably feel right or wrong, the possibilities are endless. You have to figure out what direction you want to go in by understanding the width and breadth of your emotions surrounding as many things as you can. This contrasts an “objective” morality which dictates what direction people should tend to go in as better or worse and leaves less decision to an individual. This is not about the merits of individuality, nor am I making an argument for individuality, but I feel more at peace knowing I have a choice.
Sometimes the world doesn’t feel real. Sometimes I need to look at the veins in my mother’s hands, or the leaves on a tree, or hear the happiness in a loved one’s laugh to ground me. Those things feel right. But how do I choose to experience those? When do I choose to experience those? It’s much like creative block. How do I go about expressing and consuming love for those things in my life which I hold sacred? I have to decide. It’s not up to a deity, or a religious figure to tell me how many times I should be doing those things, but it’s my decision. The world doesn’t feel real because I am the experience of sensory information being processed by a flesh calculator. There is no inherent meaning to what or why I want to see things, and I don’t think there’s a higher purpose to what is happening on our planet. Moral relativity is the idea that things matter to individuals, not as some sort of objective Cartesian grid you can plot morality coefficients across, but just as internal, intransitive experiences that can conglomerate on a larger scale to create moral trends across a specific population, time, and place. But it all starts with individuals trying to reach inside to understand themselves, because living is a journey to knowing oneself before it passes.
This morning I went on a walk and saw a squirrel stealing a tomato from someone’s garden. It was a green tomato that it could barely bite into, being roughly half its size. I was feeling like nothing really mattered and putting one foot in front of the other felt like trudging through mud. This squirrel had given me eyes that told me not to knock on that house’s door to tell on it. I’m not a snitch. I had originally planned on running, but I couldn’t run in the mud. My mind switches between the ideas of “feeling nothing matters, so why should anything matter” and “so many things matter to me, why should nothing matter”. I don’t really know why it switches like that, but I prefer the latter. The former places me in the mud. The latter lets me giggle at the squirrel and go on with my day.
